Stacked Deck, the deluxe edition of The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, makes reference to a 3-part Doug Moench Joker story (with Don Newton and Gene Colan) that ran in Batman #365-366 and Detective Comics #532. At least one of them is a key issue, apparently, since it features the first Jason Todd in costume as Robin.
Has it ever been reprinted?
For that matter, has the Doug Moench run been reprinted in general? Seems like a good candidate for a Showcase volume.
Posted by Greg at May 9, 2008 11:18 PM
The (first) Doug Moench run on Batman/Detective has been pretty completely dropped down the memory hole. Besides containing the inconvenient "original" version of Jason Todd, these are the stories that Frank Miller and his lesser imitators were standing in opposition to. They were flushed out of continuity less than a year after Moench left the titles.
For the uninitiated, what was it about Moench's run that Miller and others had issues with? Were they not the "Dark Knight" version that has taken over since the late 80's? What was the original Todd character that made him inconvenient? I am dreadfully curious and if they won't see the light of day, I may never know! Tell all!
The thing I miss the most from those days (I've still got the entire run, so "miss" is a relative term) is Don Newton's Batman art.
Fil: Remember Batman as psychotic loner? Yeah. Moench's wasn't. He had friends, emotional attachments, long-running sub-plots about his personal life that weren't about his emotional abuse of those who looked to him for leadership.
In the period prior to DKR, Englehart's run was probably the most influential on Batman's portrayal, or Englehart and O'Neil.
At least, that is my memory of the time, when I wasn't paying that close attention.
Theron: Yeah. Newton was a great draftsman.
On the flip side, Jason Todd was kind of a waste of character space.
What was the original Todd character that made him inconvenient?
Jason Todd's was originally similar to Dick Grayson's (circus acrobat whose parents were killed by a criminal). This was modified to "tried to steal Batmobile's hubcaps" after the Crisis.
Unfortunately, the problem with Jason Todd wasn't as simple and elegant as "pre-Crisis" and "post-Crisis" implies. The first Jason--created while Len Wein was behind the editor's desk, was about as close to a clone of Dick Grayson as you could get without calling him "Dick Grayson." He was in a circus aerial acrobatic act with his parents, the Flying Todds, who were murdered by Killer Croc. That remained the status quo for about three-and-a-half years. Indicative of the fact that DC seemed to have no idea of how to follow Crisis, this version of Jason continued to appear for about a year after Crisis.
Then Denny O'Neil took over the editorial reigns. Within a couple of months, Batman: Year One had started in Batman, although Jason Todd continued to appear in Detective. In fact, the "pre-Crisis" Jason had been shot and was beginning his recovery in Detective #674, on sale at the same time as Batman #407, the final part of Year One. Despite this, in Batman #408, the "post-Crisis" juvenile delinquent Jason Todd is introduced, and Batman has clearly never seen him before. There may have been some sort of stab at an explanation, but I found the whole thing too annoying and refused to buy the issue.
That was it for me, as far as Jason Todd was concerned. And looking back, I have to wonder if it hadn't been O'Neil's intention to make the fans turn on Jason all along. It was, after all, only 18 issues until A Death in the Family started up. And then Jason hadn't even been dead for a year before Tim Drake debuted. By this point, I'm sure we'll never get a straight story, though.
It's been rumored for years that when Jim Starlin asked O'Neil what would happen if Jason survived the phone poll, O'Neil responded, "it doesn't matter, we'll kill him anyway a few issues later."
Notice that Starlin was off the Bat-books not long afterwardds.
Dan, I actually remember Starlin saying something to the effect of, "We didn't really have to have immediate plans for what would happen if he lived, because he was going to be so badly injured that he wouldn't recover for a while." I never got the sense that he would be dead regardless of what the fans voted. (Starlin's run on Batman was painfully bad, but not quite as bad as the Max Allan Collins story which rebooted Jason Todd. That was so bad that I shredded my copy and pasted the fragments into an apa zine with the caption "My review of Batman #408.)
And Doug, the revival of Robin in the form of Tim Drake was a mandate from Warner Corporate. Robin is DC's fourth-most-lucrative licensing character, behind the Big Three. Batman editorial really did intend for him to stay dead.
Batman in the Eighties, which I re-read last night, talks a fair amount about the Robin/licensing issue, including how it affected the New Teen Titans.
It also reprints NTT v2 #55, which is when Dick learned about Jason's death. Danny Chase was quite the ass.
Maroney: Oh man, I remember some of those Collins Batman stories. They were terrible.
Denny O'Neil, and those who followed him, really ruined Batman , didn't they?